


what the water gave me

by cartoonmoomba



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: hashtag these kids deserved better parents than the ones they got
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-04
Updated: 2017-10-04
Packaged: 2019-01-09 04:13:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12268668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cartoonmoomba/pseuds/cartoonmoomba
Summary: There are ghosts in the water. Jason, of course, but also the part of Cheryl that was ready to die that day, to be buried under layers of ice bleeding red with the force of Archie’s desperate fists.That part of her never leaves her; not really.It doesn’t quite leave any of them.-Three kids at Pop's Diner almost form the "we are not our parents" club.





	what the water gave me

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Nothing belongs to me. Title is from Florence + The Machine.
> 
> This a stream of thoughts trying to masquerade as something cohesive.

.

.

 

Before they release her father, Veronica’s world is a pendulum of two extremes (because Veronica Lodge doesn’t do things in the middle):

_To love her father, or not to love her father?_

_To forgive, or not to forgive?_

(The hospital, Ethel’s father and his pills—) 

Before Riverdale, it would have been easy. Before her father went and fucked things up by being a fucked up man revealed to the world, it would have been _easy_. It was _easy_ to be Veronica Lodge, to be toxic and cruel and laugh at girls drinking gutter water with tears of hatred in their eyes. It was all so easy to be a part of that world, but now— 

( _Poorest rich girl there is in Riverdale_ , she heard the whispers in the school halls, and, well – it was not exactly false.) 

Veronica taps her manicured nails against the linoleum lining the booth table and thinks: 

Before, _before_ ; it has built her world. 

She doesn’t quite know what to do in the _after_. 

.

.

 

At Pop’s, under the fluorescent lights that make it feel like the farthest thing from two a.m in the middle of the night, two girls sit all prim and proper. The world beyond the illuminated parking lot outside looks a lot like the ocean, or maybe Sweetwater River after rain season, deep and swift and ready to swallow you whole. 

(There are ghosts in the water. Jason, of course, but also the part of Cheryl that was ready to die that day, to be buried under layers of ice bleeding red with the force of Archie’s desperate fists.

That part of her never leaves her; not really. 

It doesn’t quite leave any of them.) 

.

.

 

The clock ticks on and Cheryl says, with the vivid red colour of her lipstick staining the straw of her milkshake, "I should have ran away with him." 

The strange, not quite companionable silence between them has been broken and Veronica briefly finds herself wondering how she ended up here, sharing a booth and cold fries with Cheryl. Not quite friends, not quite enemies – a side effect of saving someone’s life by pulling them from the currents of a river, maybe. She had walked in looking for somewhere to _be_ and Cheryl was just there, and it was natural to slide in across from her to the rise of a red eyebrow and the quirk of glossy red lips. 

She doesn’t need to ask who the _him_ is. “And Riverdale would have ended up with not one, but two murder mysteries.” The words are out of her mouth before her brain can catch them and she fears for a second that maybe it’s too soon, that she’s being cruel – but it's two a.m and sometimes she feels exhausted of censoring herself, of trying to be the good girl she wants to be.

Cheryl’s shoulders (and Veronica remembers how small and frail they had looked, drenched in the waters of the river) rise and fall in an answer. “At least we would have been together,” the girl says. There are no lies in her words, nor any kind of heat or anger: just acceptance, as if she is stating the weather. 

The paleness of Cheryl’s skin, Veronica thinks, and the shadows underneath her collarbones are nearly the same as her brother’s that day they pulled his body out of the water. ( _That’s two Blossoms the river has given them, now; but only one was lucky enough to make it out alive_ ). Veronica hadn’t noticed it before but Cheryl is fading: there is a starker than usual contrast now, between her body and the colour of her hair, the red of her lips and the dramatics of her clothes. They burn against the graying whiteness of her skin. 

She looks away from the decaying girl in front of her out to the parking lot ( _Sweetwater River and Cheryl falling through the ice, a marionette flying off her strings)_ and has nothing to say. 

The clock ticks on.   

( _Before, before,_ before.)

.

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In the booth on the other side of the diner, the clacking of Jughead's fingers against his laptop's keyboard continues on.  

.

.

Time passes, the night shift worker still missing somewhere out in the back either sleeping or smoking a joint, and Veronica blurts out: 

“Are you happy your father is dead?” 

Cheryl tilts her head, her eyebrows raised in a challenge. “Are you happy your father is being released?” 

 _Yes_ , Veronica thinks but doesn’t say. Then: 

 _No_. 

There is a flush of embarrassment on her cheeks. Cheryl’s tongue swipes at her bottom lip, capturing the cream from her milkshake caught there. 

“Yes,” she finally says, looking like the little girl she really is underneath all her fire and her anger and her money. Her lower lip trembles, and Veronica knows she really means _no_.

The clock ticks on. 

The ocean of the world outside remains silent and dark, churning, churning, always  _churning_.

. 

. 

 

They return home, Jughead to his fosters' house on the wrong side of the tracks and Veronica to the best silk sheets her mother’s dwindling money can buy. 

Cheryl comes back to Thornhill and burns it down with a smile, little girl and angry crone, to the agonized screaming of her mother. 

 _(Jason burns with the mansion, his untouched room curling into itself like parchment and crumbling into ash. Cheryl sees the red and the heat and feels it is more fitting for the brother she loves, moreso than his frozen body and the bullet hole done by their father’s gun.)_

.

.

 

“We are not our parents,” Jughead’s voice had addressed the monsters twisting their guts into tar from his spot in the diner, in some hidden moment of the night where even Cheryl had nothing to reply with. 

It feels just a little like betrayal when she spots the Serpents jacket slung across his shoulders not even a week later. 


End file.
